Want to make your Jump Start website(s) faster? Me too. I’ll be using Google PageSpeed Insights to run several speed tests on various pages using Jump Start and document my findings along the way. The goal with this series is to get as close to a score of 100 for mobile and desktop as possible. To get there, I’ll modify server settings, use plugins, remove plugins, optimize images and improve the child theme as needed. Modify and test… rinse and repeat. Hopefully we’ll learn a thing or two along the way.

I’ve been using Jump Start and developing custom child themes for a couple years now. I was even in on the beta release so I’ve been involved since the beginning. Jump Start v2 is a game changer in my opinion. The visual design elements are stunning and modern on the front end, and developer friendly under the hood. You can get pretty fancy in a hurry using Builder elements and create very powerful websites with a little bit of code. The Jump Start framework is an amazing foundation to build upon.

The sites I build have very similar core set of plugins along with a few outliers to get specific jobs done. Since I also host the sites I build, I can not only control what is being served to the browser, but how it is being served. The combination of the two is very important to the end result.

I’ve had this sandbox site for some time now and just recently wiped it clean and installed Jump Start v2.0.3. Currently, it’s bare bones. The child theme is clean and the theme base is set to Entrepreneur. The only plugins are the ones recommended by the framework.

Now, it’s time to get started.